|
|
|
Foreign Policy
Two Hours with Hugo
Chávez
By Tomás Eloy Martínez
In the teeming river of dictators that runs through Latin American history, never has one so inscrutable surfaced as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Defining him through a series of negations is perhaps more appropriate than describing his elusive personality.
Is he a dictator? Perhaps the term depicts what Chávez says better than what he does. Yet even his deeds suggest that he interprets democracy differently than most people. Unlike Juan Perón or Augusto Pinochet, he has not choked off freedom of expression or of the press, but neither has he eliminated the fear that these liberties may end with the first bout of government insecurity. There are no political prisoners as in Cuba, but dozens of judges have been arbitrarily removed for presumed corruption. Emphasizing the “patriotic and voluntary” nature of its exertions, the army builds hospitals, repairs bridges, and purchases food in the countryside to sell at cost in public markets. Who could oppose that? “With Venezuela’s terrible social drama,” Chávez says, “we cannot afford the luxury of having 100,000 men in the barracks, eating and standing guard while people starve on street corners.” He may be right. But he used to be just a cashiered lieutenant colonel, and resentment may lurk among Venezuela’s generals. They are, however, very aware of his popularity with the troops, and they know that a general without full control of his troops is somewhat irrelevant.
Neither is Chávez a radical leftist seeking to overturn property laws. Yet in campaign speeches he defended the right of the needy to occupy the weekend homes of modest middle-class families, while his letter to Carlos the Jackal (a Venezuelan terrorist jailed in Paris) and admiring words about Fidel Castro smack of the rhetoric of the old left. And while he preaches friendship with the United States, his foreign affairs minister wastes no opportunity to exhibit his long-held anti-Americanism.
When I sat down for a two-hour conversation with Chávez in the Palacio de Miraflores in Caracas, I expected to confront a terrible despot. But he radiates the opposite image: that of a simple country boy, open to criticism and willing to admit mistakes. His gestures are seductive. He refers to visitors by their first names, occasionally calling them “brother,” inviting them to join his travels, his crusades against poverty in Venezuela’s interior, his Sunday morning call-in radio show.
When I listened to the tapes of our conversation, however, I learned how deceiving first impressions can be. Behind his affable demeanor, Chávez is wed to a few rigid and recurring ideas. Initially, he seems to agree with the arguments offered to him, but later, when the subject re-emerges, he reverts to prior formulations, as though he had memorized a single speech from which he was unwilling or unable to depart. Is this insecurity or fanaticism? It’s difficult to know. For Chávez there is always a single truth, with no shades of gray. Although his personality has much in common with those of earlier Latin American dictators, Chávez understands that authoritarianism faces stiffer resistance now. Will he be more astute than predecessors such as Perón, Rafael Trujillo, or Venezuela’s Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who he personally invited to his presidential inauguration?
Since his adolescence, the president has felt predestined to fulfill the legacy that Simón Bolívar left unfinished 170 years ago. He can recite the Liberator’s writings and surrounds himself with portraits and symbols commemorating his hero. But unlike Bolívar, whose political plans were always painstakingly designed, Chávez is not always predictable. His unwillingness to clarify how much he shares of his radical allies’ anachronistic economic thinking has scared foreign investors and whatever is left of a once strong business community.
Because of his inexperience and provincial worldview, Chávez appears not to understand that complex interests swirling outside Venezuela could cause his projects to fail. He seems naive and irresponsible. When I asked if he feared dashing the hopes he had planted in so many people and speculated that such disenchantment could lead to chaos, he looked at me as though the idea had never crossed his mind. “God is with us,” he said.
During the 1970s and even later, Latin America’s authoritarian leaders believed they were forever altering their countries’ political traditions. Pinochet, Jorge Rafael Videla, and Jean-Claude Duvalier did so, at least partially. After their tenures, Chile, Argentina, and Haiti were never the same. Chávez is attempting to shake the foundations of Venezuelan democracy and replace them with new institutions displaying doubtful democratic affinities, though anchored in popular support. Is he creating a new model for authoritarianism that could spread throughout the Americas? Or is he a social avenger who will come to understand that without playing by the new rules of a globalized world-markets and democracy—he is doomed to fail? Although Chávez remains an enigma, it seems likely that, rather than remaking history, he will be remade by it.
Tomás Eloy Martínez, director of the Latin American Studies Program at Rutgers University, is the author of many works on Peronism. His latest novel is Santa Evita (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).